Pentateuch with Megiloth and Haphtaroth

AUCTION 26 | Monday, November 22nd, 2004 at 1:00

Exceptional Printed Books, Sixty-Five Hebrew Incunabula: The Elkan Nathan Adler-Wineman Family Collection

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Lot 47

(BIBLE)

Pentateuch with Megiloth and Haphtaroth

With nikud (vocalization) and te’amim (cantillation) ff. 55 (of 218). 16 leaves bound in at end - “the final 2ff. from Bragadin’s Chumash, Venice 1644, and the previous 14ff. are also from a Bragadin Chumash, but from an edition unknown to the British Museum” (Wineman Cat. 47). Few light stains. 17th-century blind-tooled calf, with hinges (though lacking clasps), rebacked. 8vo Vinograd, Brescia 6; Goldstein 63; Offenberg 22; Steinschneider, p. 3, no. 15; Wineman Cat. 47; not in Goff or Thesaurus. Cambridge University with single fragment; not in JNUL, HUC, JTSA. Offenberg lists just four recorded copies (three incomplete)

Brescia: Gershom ben Moses Soncino 1493-4

Est: $30,000 - $40,000

PRICE REALIZED $27,000

EXTREMELY RARE INCUNABLE. ONLY ONE COMPLETE COPY EXTANT, AT THE BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA, MILAN. It was in Brescia, westernmost city in the Republic of Venice, that Gershom found a temporary home after having been exiled from Soncino together with his fellow Jews by the intemperate ruler of the Duchy of Milan, Lodovico “Il Moro.” “Of all the territories tributary to Venice, none was more valuable to her than Brescia, ‘the armed,’ for from her workshops famed for centuries…came the most splendid specimens of the armorer’s art, the weapons of war so valiantly used by the island republic in her many wars of conquest and defense” (D. Amram, The Makers of Hebrew Books in Italy, p. 72). Gershom Soncino spent the years 1490-95 in Brescia, producing chiefly Pentateuchs, prayer books and psalters. Amram finds this to be a sign of the times: “When men are in daily terror of their lives and in fear of the confiscating hand of the oppressor, they have no inclination for the delights of literature…The books that followed were the necessities of the religious, rather than the luxuries of the intellectual, life.” Ibid., pp. 79-80